Quote of the day
Today’s quote of the day is from Bitter at Shall Not Be Questioned:
As a fairly feminist woman, I actually have very little objection to idea that sex sells – especially sexy women. But sexy is doesn’t mean trashy.
Amen, sister! Maybe I am just getting old, but a low cut shirt, bad bleached hair, tats and skin hanging out doesn’t scream sexy, it screams what Wee’rd would call “banged up”.
It’s a major award!
I was nominated by both Knightbane and Larry. Thanks, guys!
The rules are:
1. Copy and paste award on your blog.
2. Link back to the blogger who gave you the award.
3. Pick your five favorite blogs with less than 200 followers and leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have received an award. This one is tough. Most of the blogs that I follow are pretty popular. But I’ll give it a try.
4. Hope that the five blogs chosen will keep spreading the love and pass it on to five more blogs.
OK, here goes:
1) American Manifesto. Dod is an old friend. He doesn’t post all that often these days (Something about being a full time law student!) but when he does post it is thoughtful and well reasoned.
2) Less than Womprat (Stylized as <WR.) Also not the most frequent posters, but always funny and derisive.
3) Straight Forward in a Crooked World Dark arts for the good guys.
And now the cheaty ones
4) Weer’d World – I’m sure Weer’d has more than 200 followers, but I still love him.
5) A NC Gun Blog – Sean has been a beast for gun rights in NC
Paul Valone responds to Michael Luo
Sean has the link. Paul uncovers what we already knew: the data is junk, the conclusions are bunk, and Mr. Luo has a history of this.
Another newbie joins the ranks
This time, on the pages of Elle Magazine.
Too many money quotes in this one:
My next thought is, I want to do that again! I have an immediate, exhilarated reaction. Partly it’s that what I’ve just done initially frightened me, so there’s a sense of a limit overcome. For many people I know, guns remain unreal—the accessories of fictional characters, or at least of the Other, not you and yours. Yet to fire a gun is to realize you can do it: You can operate one, understand how it works. Shooting gives me a rush that comes from a feeling of (admittedly incomplete) mastery.
The author also does a good job describing the “zen” of shooting.
Plus, the sensory experience of target shooting—readying your stance, controlling your breath, focusing on the target—is so absorbing that I can’t indulge my free-floating worries. I can’t have a self-conscious intellectual reaction when firing a gun. It’s almost meditative. At one point I glimpse a woman in her sixties dressed in a white polo, creased khakis, and pristine white sneakers—attire for a day of golf at the country club; she’s brandishing a Glock. I have to stop myself from laughing with delight.
When people ask my why I shoot, I say to relax. And it is exactly how she described. You have to be completely focused on the task at hand…no room for day to day worries.
H/T to Shall not be Questioned.
On the opposition
Sean has an excellent post up on why we have to press the fight on the anti-gunners. Sean has been both tireless and creative in getting the pro-gun message out. It took a big, brass pair to participate alone protesting the “Too Many Victims” rally.
I have a policy of not linking to the moonbat in Duluth, or the one in Oregon. I do so for a very simple reason. I don’t want to legitimize their arguments. They have both demonstrated that they are not serious about conversation. They say things that are demonstrably untrue. When they are called out on it, they call us names and tell us we are big meanies. It’s the internet equivalent of baby talk, and my refusal to engage is the internet equivalent of “Hush up, the grownups are talking.” Engaging with them is not worth the time it takes. Sebastian has a good take on this.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we should ignore all of them. Consider the civil rights movement. We have reached our high water mark: segregation is no longer legal. Now we need to change the culture so that it is unthinkable that a reasonable man would consider it an option. Part of that was taking the gloves off. You had to call a bigot a bigot, and show the world the ugliness of his bigotry.
And so it is with gun rights. It’s all over but the crying in the legal arena. The anti-gunners are determined to fight to the last man. They aren’t reacting rationally. (Consider Chicago. Who in their right mind would think that a law that simultaneously requires training and bans the means of that training would stand? It was the legal equivalent of “Oh, yeah! Well, you can’t make me!”) We’ve got four states that practice constitutional carry, and soon there will be more. It’s only a matter of time before we have constitutionally protected, shall-issue concealed carry.
But the work that we have left to do is to show the world the ugliness of the bigotry. And part of that is calling things what they are. The anti-gunners like to portray themselves as victims. They say that they speak for the victims of “gun violence.” I say that they make sure there are more victims.
Joe has his just one question, but to be frank I think we need to put it more emphatically. I’ve decided to call them out, and put the blood back on the hands of the likes of Joan and Baldr.
So let me state emphatically, for the record: Joan, you get people killed. Baldr, you get people killed. Mr. Troll at the CSGV who publishes the names of bloggers but doesn’t have the stones to post under his own name: You. Get. People. Killed. Your bigotry is ugly, offensive, and it’s getting people killed.
On Piracy
Question: How is SOPA/PIPA/EIEIO like gun control?
Answer: They are both nonsensical solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Nonsensical, in that DNS is a completely optional piece of the internet stack. Pirates will simply set up their own, or go directly to IP addresses. DNS blocking will in no way solve the problem. I stated to type up the technical details, but Borepatch did it better. Go there. I’ll wait.
“The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
–John Gilmore
As for the problem not existing: The error that everyone makes here is in assuming that pirated material displaces a real sale. In the vast and overwhelming majority of cases that is not the case. How much do you think the folks who remix Hitler videos are going to be willing to pay to license the content? Umm….nothing. Which is exactly how much you got for it. Enjoy the free marketing and call it even.
What about whole works? Are those folks going to plunk down full price for your movie? Or are we extending to people who would have never seen your work in the first place. To paraphrase Steve Ballmer:
“If they are going to be pirating, I want them to be pirating my stuff.”
So at the end of the day, we have a horrible, intrusive set of laws that penalize people who have done nothing wrong, and not only fails to solve the problem it claims to address, but is structurally incapable of doing so. Where have I heard that one before?
Quote of the year!
Breaking self-imposed silence in protest of SOPA/PIPA, and we are presented with the Quote of the Year by Larry Corriea of Monster Hunter and Hard Magic fame:
As for all of the people out there on the internet having a massive freak out about the government potentially damaging something they love… WELCOME TO THE PARTY.
For those of us who love the shooting sports, government intervention in an effort to destroy what we love is nothing new.
On Strike!
Today, Newbie Shooter will be on strike in order to protest SOPA/PIPA.
Does it matter if it was a gun death?
This is a sad one from just around the corner.
Charlotte Mecklenburg and Fayetteville police arrested suspect Mark Anthony Cox, 22, at around 1 p.m. in Fayetteville in connection with the death of Danielle Watson and her unborn child.
Her fiancee got a call from the victim, but no one was on the other end. He called the police, and somehow they ended up going to the wrong address. They found her body 6 hours later.
The shopping center that the restaurant where the young woman was killed in is very upscale and considered very safe. It’s about two blocks from my daughter’s school. It’s the last place you would expect anyone to be murdered.
The suspect is here. As you might expect, it’s not his first rodeo. He got released from prison on 11/1/2011.
Finally, I found this story, which contains a sad detail:
“After [Cox] left my daughter,” David Watson said, “he took her car and I guess he maybe got $2600 at the most at the safe…he went home. That’s where he lives with his parents across the street, and his sister, and from what I hear he told his sister what happened.”
“He just said he did something really bad,” added Denise, Danielle’s mother.
The writing is terrible, but the way I read that is that the suspect lived across the street from the victim’s house. UPDATE: I read it wrong. The suspect lived across the street from the Flying Biscuit Cafe. And worked a second job a block away from my daughters school.
But a stabbing, not a gun death, and so, not counted by the Brady Bunch.
Alone at night, with a felon, and murdered for $2,600. Carry your guns, people.
Now that’s a fisking!
Barron takes on She Who Must Not Be Named, and wins.
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